IBM announced the official opening of its 10th global security operations center (SOC) in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia designed to support the alliance of Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) and IBM to provide customers in the Saudi business sector with managed and cloud security services.
The new SOC, hosted in Mobily’s data center and certified by the data center authority (Uptime Institute) with “Tier IV-Design and Construction” certification, will offer the highest level of around-the-clock protection and service and help them proactively manage emerging threats including real-time analysis and early warning notification of security events. This is a completely self contained SOC where logs and data do not leave the Kingdom.
The SOC will leverage the IBM X-Force Protection System back end managed security services infrastructure to assist analysts with the aggregation, correlation, analysis and prioritization of security logs and events. With the help of this global infrastructure, IBM analyzes more than 15 billion security events each day from devices located in more than 140 countries.
“We are witnessing today increasing security threats globally from the adoption of new and existing technologies. Because cyber security is important to the business sector in KSA, we are providing through the newly launched security operations center our customers in Saudi Arabia with the highest level of security for their data to help protect their company’s reputation and value,” said Khalid Al Kaf, CEO and Managing Director, Mobily.
Today’s networked world poses many opportunities to forward thinking organizations. However, it does come with its own risks. Organizations need to be available, reliable and accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to better serve their always-connected customers. Globalization and social media now mean that good and bad news travel instantly around the world, affecting reputation of organizations in virtually seconds.
The newly launched security operations center will help the alliance of Mobily and IBM to provide safe, secure and dependable services to their clients and partners. The SOC will also ensure that organizations are secure to safe-guard their clients data as well as their own.
“Companies and organizations today are faced with a constantly evolving threat landscape, with emerging technologies making it increasingly difficult to manage and secure confidential data. A security breach can impact brand reputation, shareholder value, and expose confidential information,” said Takreem El Tohamy, General Manager, IBM Middle East and Africa. “Our team of specialists in collaboration with Mobily will track and monitor security events and attack activity to better help our clients in Saudi Arabia stay ahead of emerging threats.”
This collaboration is part of a strategic five year agreement signed by Mobily and IBM in 2012 to provide comprehensive IT solutions such as managed and cloud security services, for the business sector in the Kingdom. The agreement with IBM will provide Mobily with faster, targeted access to new technologies and expertise in order to build a strong infrastructure to keep pace with the company’s business growth.
A recent IBM Global Reputational Risk and IT Survey among more than 600 senior-level executives from 23 industries analyzed how security and business continuity can shape the reputation and value of companies. The study revealed that companies have rising IT risk concerns related to emerging technology trends as cloud and social media.
When asked about how well companies are rating their reputation and how well they are protecting it, 80% of respondents rated their company’s reputation as excellent or very good, only 17% of the same respondents rated their company’s overall ability to manage IT risk as very strong. The study also revealed that the top three IT risk factors that can cause the most reputational harm are data breach, system failure and data loss.
Today’s announcement is part of IBM’s significant investment in growth markets. IBM operates nine other global security operations centers in Atlanta, Georgia; Boulder, Colorado; Toronto, Canada; Brussels, Belgium; Tokyo, Japan; Brisbane, Australia; Hortolandia, Brazil; Bangalore, India and Wroclaw, Poland, all servicing clients from points across the globe.
All of the centers are designed to protect mission-critical systems, electrical systems, data processing and communication links from any single point of failure further extending IBM’s ability to provide real-time analysis and notifications that help keep businesses ahead of the most pressing and progressively complex security threats.
